A little over fifty years ago picking, husking and sorting ears of corn would be done two or three rows at a time by a person in the field wearing a corn husking hook. Today ears of corn are usually mechanically harvested by a corn picker and maybe delivered to a corn husking unit to be husked. Corn husking units usually process a large number of ears of corn and often fail to completely remove the husk off of every ear of corn. After the ears of corn have been processed by the corn husking unit, the ears of corn must then be reviewed for flaws and sorted.
Ears of corn that still have a full husk, are partially husked, diseased, or rogue are considered defective and must be properly sorted and/or removed from the production stream. The sorting of the ears of corn has almost been exclusively done on a conveyor by human hands. Unfortunately, using human labor to sort the ears of corn has several drawbacks. Typically, the ears of corn are moving quickly along the conveyor so there is a need for multiple people sorting on each conveyor to accurately sort the ears of corn. In addition, people need to take breaks, occasionally get sick, and are unable to consistently repeat a process the same way every time. Furthermore, using human labor can have a high turnover rate and new employees must be trained. Therefore, the costs associated with sorting ears of corn may be reduced by automating the sorting process. There would be significant advantages of using an automated system instead of human labor.
There have been attempts to automate the process of sorting corn but none have been capable of effectively replacing a human. To effectively automate the corn sorting process, the automated corn sorter has to be able to identify the defective corn and be able to sort the defective corn into multiple sorting areas. The unhusked and partially husked corn must be returned to the husking unit, while the diseased and rogue corn must be removed from the process. Similarly, sorting other food products, such as walnuts, almonds, peaches, apricots, etc., using human labor have the same inherent deficiencies described above with human corn sorting.
Sorting systems are well known in the art. For some products, particularly those that require visual inspection, the systems require manual removal and are labor intensive. These systems also, in addition to being expensive to operate, are not as accurate as desired at an acceptable speed or require longer periods of sorting to increase accuracy. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system that addresses these needs.
Therefore an objective of the present invention is to provide a sorting system that is automated, with a high level of accuracy. Another objective of the present invention is to provide a sorting system that is less expensive and more efficient to operate. These and other objectives will be apparent to one skilled in the art based upon the following written description, drawings, and claims.